It’s well known that left-wing Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was a psychopath, a dark status that led to his exterminating 20 million human beings. Yet the people who help vault such tyrants to power — sometimes pejoratively called “useful idiots” — are well-meaning but naive sorts, right? Perhaps not always.
In fact, a new study informs, Stalin has much psychopathic (and narcissistic) company among leftists, including among today’s variety. Moreover, the researchers found that authoritarian-minded left-wingers often don’t care a whit about the altruism and “social justice” they trumpet, but instead “use political activism to endorse or exercise violence against others to satisfy their own ego-focused needs.”
The study authors, Ann Krispenz, a postdoctoral associate; and Alex Bertrams, the head of the Educational Psychology Lab at the University of Bern, published their research in March in the journal Current Psychology. The phenomenon they studied is called “left-wing authoritarianism” (LWA), and they related its indicators.
They are “anticonventionalism (i.e., the absolute endorsement of progressive moral values), top-down censorship (i.e., the preference for the use of governmental and institutional authority to suppress any speech that is considered as offensive and intolerant), and antihierarchical aggression (i.e., the motivation to use force and aggression to overthrow established hierarchies),” PsyPost.org quotes the two researchers as saying.
Of course, leftists’ dogmatism and censorship efforts are notorious, the latter being the reason industrialist Elon Musk bought Twitter. As for “antihierarchical aggression,” left-wing violence began with the bloody French Revolution (1789) and continues to this day, perpetrated by groups such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter.
Not surprisingly, the researchers found that someone high in LWA tendencies may “endorse the use of violence to reach their own political goals.” In fact, they wrote at Current Psychology, citing others’ scholarship, some “left-wingers are more likely than right-wingers to endorse harming or even murdering their political opponents.”
This won’t surprise readers of The New American, which has published essays such as 2020’s “Violence, Inc.: A Leftist Enterprise.” The piece quotes, for example, hard-left ex-CNN host Reza Aslan as saying that Donald Trump supporters “must be eradicated from society.”
Bertrams and Krispenz also “found that individuals high in LWA tended to have high levels of neurotic narcissism, which means they cared strongly about what others thought of them, experienced high levels of shame, and had a strong need for admiration,” PsyPost further relates.
Note here that “shame” is (in the sense used above) a very different phenomenon than guilt. Guilt is a genuine feeling of self-reproach experienced because we sense we’ve committed a wrong, and we feel it even if no one else knows what we’ve done; it is conscience pain. Shame is a species of embarrassment we feel because we are being, or could be, reproached by others. Put simply, guilt involves what we, often instinctively, think about ourselves; shame, a shallower motivator, is concern over what others think of us. It’s the difference between having honor and wanting to be honored.
This, of course, explains leftists’ moral preening. It explains why a liberal NYC parent would say, when his kid’s school was poised to be “strengthened with diversity,” “It’s more complicated when it’s about your own children.” Value-signaling is convenient — as long as only others have to live with your values.
Returning to PsyPost, it continued, “Surprisingly, the researchers did not find a relationship between LWA and altruism, indicating that LWA and altruism are not strongly linked.”
Surprising? Not to author Peter Schweizer. In his 2008 piece “Don’t listen to the liberals — Right-wingers really are nicer people, latest research shows,” he reports on data indicating that conservatives are “more generous to charities, less likely to commit suicide — and even hug their children more than those on the Left [do].” And, correlating with leftists’ lack of generosity, the studies also found that they are far more money-obsessed than conservatives.
Moving on, when Bertrams and Krispenz adjusted for factors such as age, sex, and socially desirable responding, “the relationship between LWA and neurotic narcissism became less significant,” PsyPost tells us. But only because the picture got even worse.
That is, “a robust relationship between antagonistic narcissism and the LWA subfacet of antihierarchical aggression emerged.”
“This suggests that individuals who endorse aggressive actions to overthrow those in power are more likely to exhibit traits of exploiting others for their own gain, lacking empathy, feeling entitled, being arrogant and manipulative, showing reactive anger, distrusting others, and seeking thrill,” PsyPost explains. Think here of one-time left-wing “hero” and attorney Michael Avenatti, who was convicted of embezzling millions — “including $4 million from a client with major disabilities,” as CNN put it.
Bertrams and Krispenz also conducted a second study, during which they controlled for the aforementioned factors as well as “dark triad traits.” This caused the link between antihierarchical aggression and narcissism, period, to diminish. Again, however, the picture for leftists just got worse.
For a different link emerged — one between the tear-down-the-system aggression and psychopathy (a psychopath is like a demonic alien, a creature with no conscience).
In conclusion, the research “suggests that people with dark personality traits, like narcissism and psychopathy, are drawn to certain antagonistic ideologies and political activities,” states PsyPost. And far from being sincere, these individuals merely “use these ideologies and activities as a way to fulfill their own ego-centered needs.”
In fairness, PsyPost points out that those exhibiting “right-wing authoritarianism” are also more likely to be psychopathic. Yet it is notable that most of today’s authoritarians — and all the ascendant ones — occupy what’s called the “Left.”
Furthermore, the link between so-called “liberalism” and psychological dysfunction is nothing new. Studies show that conservative adults and teens are happier than their liberal peers and that more than 50 percent of young, liberal, white women have been diagnosed with some form of “mental health” problem.
Perhaps, however, this issue is far better elucidated by dispensing with the “psychology” and touching on what relates to the term’s actual meaning: “study of the soul.” What we call “leftism” or “liberalism” is not actually an ideology but, rather, is movement toward moral disorder. It is defined by vice and, as such, attracts the vice-ridden — the haters of the light.
Thus, since living a moral life is a prerequisite for happiness, as I believe Greek philosopher Aristotle pointed out, it’s not surprising that leftists would be miserable. For sin is psychological poison.
Put simply, liberals’ moral toxicity attracts them to “leftism,” which, in turn, justifies further sinning and hence the ingestion of more toxins. Thus do leftists poison themselves — and civilization in the process, with their activism and voting.
